Use of artificial intelligence is growing and expanding into applications that impact people's lives. People trust their technology without really understanding it or its limitations. There is the potential for harm and we are already seeing examples of that in the world. AI researchers have an obligation to consider the impact of intelligent applications they work on. While the ethics of AI is not clear-cut, there are guidelines we can consider to minimize the harm we might introduce.

Reports of the Workshops of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

The AAAI-17 workshop program included 17 workshops covering a wide range of topics in AI. Workshops were held Sunday and Monday, February 4-5, 2017 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square in San Francisco, California, USA. This report contains summaries of 12 of the workshops, and brief abstracts of the remaining 5

Our research aims at developing interactive, social agents that can coach people to learn new tasks, skills, and habits. In this paper, we focus on coaching sedentary, overweight individuals to exercise regularly. We employ adaptive goal setting in which the coach generates, tracks, and revises personalized exercise goals for a trainee. The goals become incrementally more difficult as the trainee progresses through the training program. Our approach is model-based - the coach maintains a parameterized model of the trainee's aerobic capability that drives its expectation of the trainee's performance. The model is continually revised based on interactions with the trainee. The coach is embodied in a smartphone application which serves as a medium for coach-trainee interaction. We show that our approach can adapt the trainee program not only to several trainees with different capabilities but also to how a trainee's capability improves as they begin to exercise more. Experts rate the goals selected by the coach better than other plausible goals, demonstrating that our approach is effective.

For more effective collaboration, users and autonomous systems should interact naturally. We propose that sketch-based interaction coupled with qualitative representations and analogy provides a natural interface for users and systems. We introduce comic graphs that capture tasks in terms of the temporal dynamics of the spatial configurations of relevant objects. This paper demonstrates, through a strategy simulation example, how these models could be learned by demonstration, transferred to new situations, and enable explanations.

Detection of fraud, waste, and abuse (FWA) is an important yet challenging problem. In this article, we describe a system to detect suspicious activities in large healthcare datasets. Each healthcare dataset is viewed as a heterogeneous network consisting of millions of patients, hundreds of thousands of doctors, tens of thousands of pharmacies, and other entities. Graph analysis techniques are developed to find suspicious individuals, suspicious relationships between individuals, unusual changes over time, unusual geospatial dispersion, and anomalous network structure.

Healthcare-related programs include federal and series of technical challenges. From a data representation state government programs such as Medicaid, view, healthcare data sets are often large and Medicare Advantage (Part C), Medicare FFS, and diverse. It is common to see a state's Medicaid program Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit (Part D). Nonhealth-care or a private healthcare insurance program having programs include Earned Income Tax hundreds of millions of claims per year, involving Credit (EITC), Pell Grants, Public Housing/Rental millions of patients and hundreds of thousands of Assistance, Retirement, Survivors and Disability Insurance providers of various types, for example, physicians, (RSDI), School Lunch, Supplemental Nutrition pharmacies, clinics and hospitals, and laboratories. Assistance Program (SNAP), Supplemental Security Any fraud-detection system needs to be able to handle Income (SSI), Unemployment Insurance (UI), and the large data volume and data diversity. While healthcare data (insurance claims, health Data patterns from both sides are dynamic. The complexity records, clinical data, provider information, and others) of the problem calls for a rich set of techniques offers tantalizing opportunities, it also poses a to examine healthcare data. Healthcare financials are complex, involving a from a suspicious individual or activity (as singled multitude of providers (physicians, pharmacies, clinics out by the automated screening components) and and hospitals, and laboratories), payers (insurance interacts with the system to navigate through data plans), and patients. To design a good fraud-detection items and collect evidence to build an investigation system, one must have a deep understanding of the case. The two categories have quite different technical financial incentives of all parties. Starting from database indexing/caching for fast data retrieval and domain knowledge, auditors and investigators have user interface design for intuitive user-system interaction.

This issue features expanded versions of articles selected from the 2014 AAAI Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence held in Quebec City, Canada. We present a selection of four articles describing deployed applications plus two more articles that discuss work on emerging applications.

This issue features expanded versions of articles selected from the 2014 AAAI Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence held in Quebec City, Canada. We present a selection of four articles describing deployed applications plus two more articles that discuss work on emerging applications.

This year's special issue on innovative applications features articles describing four deployed and two emerging applications. The articles include three different types of recommender systems, which may be as much of a critique of the role of technology in society as it is an indication of recent research trends. Modern technology provides us with access to an increasingly overwhelming array of choices ranging from dating options to software capabilities to movies. However, as a society, we prefer not to turn the power of choice over to an automated system, thereby creating demand for AIbased technologies such as recommenders.